What fields should I be searching in Ovid databases like Medline? TI, AB, KW?
Answer
Good question! Let's first go over what each field code means:
.ti = searches for the presence of a word (keyword) in the title of an article
.ab = searches for the presence of a word (keyword) in the abstract of an article
.kw = searches for author provided keywords (i.e. when an author submits their article for publication, they are often asked to provide a list of "key" terms that capture the main topics of their article
It depends how precise you want your search to be. Don't care if you miss studies on your topic and just want to retrieve a handful for a quick search on a large topic? Then you might just want to use .ti after your keyword search. For more comprehensive searches, we highly recommend that you search .ti, ab, and kf. This will yield more results for your search - you don't want to miss anything important, and you can't always rely on the title/abstract/keyword heading alone to report everything you are looking for!
To put this into practice, an example keyword search line in Ovid Medline could look like this: cold sore*.ti, ab, kf. This will search for articles that mention cold sore or cold sores in either the title, abstract OR author-provided keywords.